


Carla Baby

by ArmedWithAStaringFly



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Backstory, Episode: s02e12 A Tale of Two Stans, F/M, Recreational Drug Use
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-17
Updated: 2016-01-18
Packaged: 2018-04-09 17:27:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,229
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4357940
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArmedWithAStaringFly/pseuds/ArmedWithAStaringFly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stan was thrown out of his house and traveled the country because he had nowhere to go, but Carla ran away and joined him because she thought he could give her thrills and freedom. He should have known she'd run away from him too. </p><p>Grunkle Stan backstory, set during his flashbacks in Tale of Two Stans</p><p>Sequel chapter: A decade after leaving him, Carla finds out about the "death" of Stanley Pines from a horrific car crash. She'd lived a wild, unfocused life, but she loved him once, and his death means that she's mortal too.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. carla baby

**Author's Note:**

> I think we're like fire and water  
> I think we're like the wind and sea  
> You're burning up, I'm cooling down  
> You're up, I'm down  
> You're blind, I see  
> But I'm free  
> I'm free  
> -Brooklyn Baby, by Lana Del Rey

Carla McCorkle never did what was expected of her, Stan supposed, which is why he shouldn’t have been so surprised that he could never have kept her. He swirled his whiskey glass over the scratched barroom table and slumped his shoulders farther, letting out a heavy sigh of stale breath as he gulped down the glass.

“He says he’ll take me to India,” she had said, her new hippie clothes reeking of weed, “imagine the spiritual awakening I’ll experience! I can walk the streets of Delhi! Drink from the Ganges!” Her eyes danced, though whether that was from wonderment or acid is anyone’s guess.

“I took you to Mexico, Carla,” Stan offered, wishing he sounded less desperate than he did, “remember the beach?” His voice didn’t break there. His hands weren’t clenching.

“Oh I do, Lee, I do.” She ran a hand down his shaven cheek. “Our adventures gave me such joy. But the universe is calling me to another, and I must keep moving. I must grow, and so should you. There so much more of the world to see.“

He wanted to tell her that he’d already run from Puerto Rican and Canadian police, thank you very much, and that was plenty.

She kissed him, and that was that. The last he saw was her bell-bottom-covered (formally hot pants adorned) legs walk away as the back view of her iron straight (formally Ferrah-Fawcett luxurious) hair swayed back and forth.

Stan slid away his glass. Who was he kidding? He was always on borrowed time with her. 

Even in the beginning, she had no real reason to agree to date his early highschool self–that pimply twerp in his past made him cringe even in his thirties. She was Carla McCorkle: sweet, charming, always with a wink in her eye. Petite and pretty, she had a demure allure to her that so many had their eye on. And, therefore, so many could only stare in shock and horror when she said “Hey, why not?” with a stunning grin to a stuttering, shaking Stanley Pines.

“I don’t get it!” he heard as he walked away in a daze. “He’s not even the smart twin! At least he’ll end up rich!”

Stanley was too high to be mad. 

The thing was about Carla, though: she had a knack for getting things that work out in her favor.

Carla had just finished telling him about why she was in an old fashioned poodle skirt (“Found it in a thrift store! It’s so cute, I just had to wear it!”) when he got the chance to put those years of boxing to a use other than punching in boarded up caves. And suddenly, she was absolutely taken with him. Just in time for puberty to serve him rather well, and she could proudly walk him down school hallways with envious looks shot at both of them. He was not the smart twin, but the handsome twin was a pretty good label too.

She burst into tears when he presented his sorry ass to her front door at midnight, just to tell her he’d been kicked out and needed to leave town. Stan had no words for her, but he hung his head as she pounded on his chest. “You can live with us!” she said, “Fuck your dad! I need you!”

He knew she was being dramatic. She was Carla McCorkle, she had no need for him at all. She could get by just fine. She just wanted the thrill of the tragedy. 

“You’ll be better off without me,” he said, “I don’t have any money, anyway. Go find yourself a guy who can feed himself.” Hell, he thought bitterly, go to the smart twin. At least he’ll end up rich.

“No. I love you.”

He wanted to tell it to her back. He’d done it before. He didn’t.

Turning away from those pleading bambi eyes was the hardest thing he’d ever done. 

Fuck his dad, indeed. And fuck Stanford. He almost turned off the radio when he heard the sweet beat of the song they had danced to at prom, but stopped just short of the dial. Instead, he drummed on the dashboard and hummed along solemnly. He hummed that tune for three more years. 

It was a morning in seventies’ Brooklyn when he got his second chance. 

“Black coffee,” he grumbled, running a hand over his stubble. New York was not a bad city for him, honestly. Big, loud, and anonymous, with so many worthless cons like him that no one was too surprised when he ripped them off. He didn’t mean to come this close back to New Jersey, but he was running out of options.

“Oh my god,” whispered the voice above him. He looked up to those same brown bambi eyes from so many years ago, this time crinkled up in joy. The woman around them had barely changed; she still had a swing in her walk and an air of sweetness all around her, even if her Betty Page bangs were now glamorously swept around her face. His jaw dropped, and he stood with a start. “Carla…”

“It’s been way too long, Pines.” Her smile could still light the city.”What have you been up to all these years?”

“Driving all around. Making money here and there. I don’t stay in one place for long.” He should have said more, but his mind was reeling.

“So you’ve just been living free and travelling?” she gasped, looking at him in bubbling excitement. “living bohemian?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“I get off at ten.”

They caught up while relaxing in the tangled sheets of a cheap motel bed, one of the ones without a lot of questions asked. She was expected to be a perfect wife in a perfect nuclear family…that’s what her mother had wanted. So naturally, she could never do that, and she hopped on to the next train to New York. She had a boyfriend of sorts, she admitted. He was older. She wouldn’t say how much.

“He’s getting boring. I thought he was suave when we met but…it’s stupid. My boyfriend’s pretty cool, I guess, but he’s not as cool as me.” She winked at him with a cheeky smirk. “I wanted to be an actress,” she admitted softly, “But doesn’t everyone?”

“You never took to the housewife type, Carla baby. That’s what I like about ya.” Stan rubbed her back, kissing her messy hair.

“So what have you been doing since you rode off into the sunset?” she teased, running her fingers under his unshaven chin.

He frowned. He’d been up to running all over the country from angry mobs, selling crap to idiots to make a dime, diner dashing enough to call it a diner marathon, going to jail…more than once, and generally being a half-starving loser. But he couldn’t tell her that. 

“I drive, sell things, pick up and move, whatever. That sort of thing. I’ve been in 19 states and 3 countries, so far…”

Then, Carla said the most dangerous thing she could have said in that moment: “Take me with you.”

He did. She sent a call to her (now ex)boyfriend and her mother and that was that. Her bags joined his in the backseat, and she laughed out her open window as New York faded behind them.

Almost two years. Two years they weaved in and out of traffic, belting along to Janis Joplin and the Rolling Stones. Two years they ate in roadside diners, paying when they could but often sneaking out before bill came round and then hitting the road in a trail of dust. Two years she’d hop in his car at the gaspump with a purse filled with pilfered goods from the store, before handing him a cigarette and lighting it in his mouth with her own lighter as he drove onto the winding road. Two years that windblown hair danced in front of her eyes as she smiled at him from the passenger seat, throwing her legs on the dashboard because she knew how much he loved the way those hotpants showed them off.

He still didn’t make much money. He still found himself gluing spare junk parts together to sell on local TV. But it meant something to know that if he was banned in Wisconsin for peddling mercury-poisoned cheese, well, so was she.

He took her to the forests of Kentucky. He took her to the Grand Canyon, where she almost cried over how “magical, incredible” it was. He took her to a Texas rodeo, where she hooted and hollered like she was an old regular. They’d had many names, had been business partners and a married couple, even a pair of Soviet spies. Once they slept under New Mexico stars, where she whispered “Thanks, darling, for this lovely bohemian life,” before falling asleep on his arm. He laughed at the suckers in Vegas when he beat them of enough money to take her out on the town. 

It was there he saw the chapel, just a cheap rickety thing with a bad white paint job. He should have known it wasn’t a good idea to say them, but the words came out before he could stop. 

“What if I took you into that church, Carla baby?”

He’d never seen her shake her head so fast. “Don’t even joke, Stan.” He pretended his heart didn’t sink a bit. What was so awful, the idea of marrying him?

Sometimes, he forgot that this was all a game to her. Marriage would end that game. She lived like this for fun, not because she had no where else to go. He’d have to remember to never resent her for that. Besides, he expected she’d tire of it eventually. Everyone who didn’t need to move around did. Eventually, she’d want him to try and make settling work, and he could decide if he was that sort of guy.

But Carla never did what was expected of her.

They had spent more time in that next California town than they had most places, as Stan had expected. She seemed to like it there. She was relaxed. He was peddling Stanwiches out of a cart, and no one had gotten food poisoning yet. She was waiting tables, making friends…getting unusually stagnant. He tried not to point it out, though, because she’d start packing their bags before he finished the sentence. He knew her.

They had passed the Juke Joint while strolling one day, and like clockwork her hips started swinging. “Oh, I loved this song as a kid! We have to go in, Stanley!”

They went in every week. Stan had a few moves, of course. He could swing along with the best of ‘em. Carla would have a few drinks on the house, and leave hanging on his arm, telling him that he was the sexiest man alive. A guy could always hear that a couple more times. He could hear her say “I-heheh-I love you, honey, I’m ready to go…” a few more times too. And yeah, the diner may have reminded him of a better time, when he was half of a different pair.

Which made it even worse when she yanked her bags out of the car that day in a deerskin vest and a tie-dye shirt, makeup scrubbed off and hair flattened with feathers stuck through it. He’d found the LSD tabs in her pants the other day. He held them up to her, face red in rage. He’d known who she was with. She slammed the door and wouldn’t look him in the eye.

“It opened my mind,” she said, staring dazed off into the sky, “I feel like I’m one with the Earth when I have it. He made me realize that I’ve become stagnant. Complacent. The world is so much greater than I realized, and I need more than this.” 

“So what? You’re going off to join a hippie band? Drive around in a van and smoke pot and pretend to be profound when you’re actually just more fried than a fucking hashbrown?” That friggin long haired freak had been hypnotizing her with that psychedelic music, he knew it. She was crazy but she wasn’t this crazy. 

She gasped, pulling the guitar her new boyfriend had given her from the backseat, “I should have known you’d be like this, Stan. You never seemed to truly want this beautiful bohemian life! I should have seen this coming with that chapel crap a few months back. Thistle can appreciate freedom.”

“Maybe because I had no fucking choice! I was thrown out! I didn’t just come along for a fun ride because I was bored with my job and my home and my family who loves me but that isn’t enough for me for some goddamn reason!”

She looked at him like a deer in the headlights. “You–you just don’t understand.”

He didn’t justify that statement with a rebuttal. He didn’t understand? She didn’t understand. Instead, he swerved. “So what is this creep offering you that I can’t?” 

It was then she told him about India. And then walked away. 

He honestly didn’t mean to drive the hippie creep’s van into the ravine, he truly didn’t. He just accidentally hit the parking break when going to simultaneously prove his his music was evil and punch him in the bearded face. To be fair, they did manage to jump out before it crashed. 

For the second time in her life, Carla cried hot tears while pounding on his chest. Except this time, instead of begging him not to go, she was yelling “just GET OUT, YOU SON OF A BITCH!” 

He made a run before they could call the police. Psh, fake hippies running to the Man when the goings got tough. Figures. 

He used the LSD tab that night. She’d left it on the seat of the van, and it was a shame to let it go to waste. He saw some weird shit alright, but didn’t feel any closer to the Earth. He decided he’d stick to alcohol. Which he did, for the rest of the week. And the next, until he was so drunk that he may or may not have wacked a policeman upside the head with a roadkill possum. And he truly meant may or may not have, because he had no memory of the incident. It sounded pretty made up, if you asked him. But nevertheless, a reason to leave. 

He left the rest of her things on the side of the road to gather the dust kicked up from his spinning tires. Unfortunately, he couldn’t throw out the smell of her, or the memories that flashed seemingly every moment of her smiles and laughs and fingers running through his hair as he drove. He lit his own cigarette. 

Stanford, Dad, and now Carla. So far, Shermie was the only one who hadn’t let him down, and he hadn’t seen him in years. His son was just a baby when he left. Hope he’s turning out well. Better then the rest of the idiots in the family. Most of all him. 

He should have known. Carla was always looking for more, and he wasn’t enough for anyone else. Like hell he was going to be enough for her. 

For the first time since their break up, he pulled over to cry into the steering wheel. 

Stan guessed that was the danger of loving a woman who loved you because you offered a better adventure than the last guy: you’d lose her the same way. Carla never did what was expected of her, not even for him. Every situation, no matter how crazy, was going to be blase eventually. Also, that hypnotic hippie music had more of an influence than she let on. Plus the drugs. Can’t forget those.

Him? He was a simple man. He just wanted to survive. Make some bucks along the way.

He dried his eyes, pulling back into the interstate. He did better alone anyway. Back into the fray.


	2. just ride

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A decade after leaving him, Carla finds out about the "death" of Stanley Pines from a horrific car crash. She'd lived a wild, unfocused life, but she loved him once, and his death means that she's mortal too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Don't break me down  
> I've been travelin' too long  
> I've been trying too hard  
> With one pretty song
> 
> I hear the birds on the summer breeze, I drive fast  
> I am alone in the night  
> Been tryin’ hard not to get into trouble, but I  
> I’ve got a war in my mind  
> I just ride  
> -Lana Del Rey, “Ride”

Hearing of Stanley Pines’ death was like watching the pillars of her ancient temple fall.

She was living in northern California then, east of Goose Lake and just south of the Oregon border, not in any bustling city nor a sleepy small town. It was not home. Nothing really was. They were all stops on her nomadic life whose engine Stan himself had revved to a restless roar, even if he felt trapped in it. Still, a part of her noticed that her addresses were changing less often in those days, and she’d been spending more time depending on herself than the kindness of strangers. The freedom land of the seventies had ended. Something about the eighties seemed colder, angrier, more distant to her.

Carla was at work when her temple broke down. It was an odd job—the only kind of job she’d ever had. She had just gone to stamp her timecard when the news came to her. It was just a chance overheard conversation. She couldn’t shake the feeling that it was a message straight from God, telling her that her days were numbered too, that the treasured memories she hoarded would someday be all she had left, all because she’d never bothered to build anything permanent.

“…Then I was late for my son’s birthday a few years back. Accident up in Oregon, terrible traffic.” The patron sipped her tea, not noticing her at all. “An accident. Some man named Stanley Pines died,” the woman said with an indifference that chilled her.

Her heart stopped, her mouth hung slack, her head was dizzy. Words she’d never thought she’d hear, and they were said just then, out of a mouth to whom they meant absolutely nothing.

“Carla, are you o—“ She was out of the diner before she even saw her co-worker’s face, stumbling over her own feet and fighting the tears she so rarely cried. She shoved past strangers, gasping for air as she put as much distance between herself and the diner as she could, so she wouldn’t have to explain to anyone who he was to her.

Carla hadn’t called her sister in years. She assumed the other woman wanted nothing to do with her, even if she never said as much. She knew that part of Janice never forgave her for bursting into their New York apartment all those years ago as ferociously as an animal just broken from a cage. That’s something she’d never really mentioned to Stan; she and big sister lived together at the time, and Janice stood in the hall slack-jawed as Carla threw her belongings in a suitcase, laughingly telling her that she was running off with old Lee.

Now, she had a white-picket house, perfect children, and a 9-to-5 husband, “just the life our mother had shopped and picked out for us,” as Carla called it. But her? She was destined to be the one their highschool alumni gossiped about, the one the family never spoke about at parties but overheard others discuss in whispers and sideways glances. The one who ran off to New York at age twenty, and ran off from there with her highschool sweetheart at age twenty-two. Carla was the fucking crazy one. The one who craved freedom far too much, whose life was as splattered and chaotic as a painter’s drop cloth.

But in those moments, the fucking crazy one absorbed her sister’s words in silence, denying conversation about her own life but mumbling along as Janice explained his. Her sister was surprised, she thought Carla was the first person Ford would call past their mother and Shermie, it was so sudden, no one had heard from him in years, everyone thought Carla was the last person to see him, the accident was so horrible, but the funeral was a simple affair, just his mother and older brother in New Jersey, his own twin didn’t even show up, the bastard. She sat through that conversation in a daze, watching the cars zip past the phonebooth in flashes of color.

“How long ago?” Carla asked softly.

“Two years now, I think.”

Two years. Two years Stanley Pines had been dead. Two years was more than the time they’d even travelled together.

She asked about her nieces to steady her heart, and the sisters had a customary conversation—school plays, sports, grandma—that seemed so safe and simple, nothing Carla could ever dare to wish for at this point. They hung up with an awkward exchange of goodbyes and half-serious promises to stay in touch.

Carla spent the evening sitting on the roof of her apartment, a rundown building in the worst part of town but housing the most interesting people, as these kind of establishments always do. She hadn’t even bothered to change out of her tight red waitressing dress or unpin her hair, and her heels hung limply in her other hand. She took long whiffs of her cigarette and watched the smoke twist towards the summer evening sky.  For a moment, she saw his smoke curling in the air too, after she gave him a light and he drove down the road, eventually smirking at her and asking what was so damn good to look at. She’d just giggle and kick her feet up, not even bothering to hide how she stared at his profile in those dark sunglasses, studying the distant road.

God, he had been immortal to her.

Carla ached to find him, ask him not to leave her now, say that even though she hadn’t seen him in a decade, she couldn’t deal with losing someone like him for good. She couldn’t deal with losing anyone she’d ever loved for good. But Stanley Pines…Stanley Pines was the type of person you never expected to really ever die. He was too gruff, too stubborn. You thought Death would approach him and he’d just roll his eyes, throw a little sarcasm, and barely dodge another bullet, or self-medicate another wound, or outwit another cop. He may have hated his bohemian life, but he was the luckiest person Carla had ever known. A car crash felt too human and everyday to end him. She’d seen him burst through the California coast at 99 mph, leaning on his window as cool and casually as if he was just on an afternoon cruise.

She took another puff of her cigarette before pressing the ash into the asphalt beside her. She was a Winston’s gal when she started smoking, but she moved to Marlbolros when he took her under his wing. It was easier for them to grab one brand at those unfortunate truckstops, and they’d smoke from the same pack as they rode over the country together. Carla left him, but that stayed. It’ll probably stay for the rest of her life. Carla McCorkle was built, sculpted, by the people she’s loved. Thistle gave her guitar, drugs, and the ability to walk away from broken promises. Jacob gave her nurturing, rebirth, and God. Maria gave her the Spanish language and care of a large family.

Carla could go on, naming the speckles of lovers across her life. Friends too. So many people she never expects to hear from again. But Stan, Stan gave her the wandering life, the sense of freedom, and the commitment to survival that made them all possible. She’d lived with him, starved with him, peddled with him, stole with him, and you can never run away from that, no matter how hard she’d tried. And how can one know if you shaped them too? She never asked, and he never admitted much. Maybe it was the gruff mystery of him that made him such an adventure in the first place.

In the flashing lights in the distance and the bustles of traffic below, she could drift away in the wind to a different life, when Stan was all she’d really experienced. Miles away, leaning on his shoulder in the whirlwind that was Vegas. Tight dress, high heels, smirk on both of their faces. Watching those lights dance and flicker on his calloused skin. He always knew how to make the dice work for him, and before long he’d made a bitch of the whole table. The looks of horror on his rivals’ faces were almost as good as the money, he used to say.  

Problem was, so was Carla.

And she knew, even then, that she was never, ever going to be enough. Her memories shifted to sitting in the dark on the edge of their well-used motel bed. He meticulously counted over his bills like she wasn’t even there, smiling in a way that she could never produce: greedy, but ecstatic, like he was one more rung up the ladder of his greatest dream. Stan had an unhappiness buried deep in his soul that had nothing to do with her, and therefore she was powerless to fix him. Most loves fight over money, specifically the lack of it. But when they fought, it was because she saw little value in money compared to the freedom and beauty of the road, but he saw money as the greatest value a person could have.

“Do you know what this money gets you Carla?” he said to her once, waving the crinkled bills in her face. She could practically see the dust of cocaine left by their last owner. “Gets ya respect in this world. And God knows I don’t have shit in that department.” His eyes told her _“least of all from myself.”_

He took her dancing that night, intentionally overfilling her glass with champagne and swooping her down for a possessive kiss when other men looked her way. Carla will admit, she laughed into his shoulder and gripped his lapels to show him and the women that he was hers, too. Still, mere months later she was riding in the back of a van with a man who burned his dollar bills on the side of the street.

None of that stopped her from thinking of Stan from time to time when her feet were washed with ocean waves, or when the Nevada sun beat down on her back, or when an old Janis Joplin song played on the radio and she could hear his rough voice crooning along to it over the open road.

Or in the moment she was in just then, when the sun set through the skyline in a shade of sapphire richer than any stone Stan could have won.

To her, Stanley Pines was not flesh and blood. He was the ink and paper of a wrinkled photo, tucked safely in the box that she keeps all the treasures of her past in. He was leaning against that old car of his, the one that ended being his downfall, tanned golden-brown from their time in Mexico. Broad shouldered, tall, enigmatically handsome with just a hint of exhaustion and anger in his eyes. He looked to the Arizona sky with his arms crossed. There was an odd, furrowed-brow expression on his face, one that even she couldn’t read. The orange light kissed him so lovingly. Downright poetic, that image was. She snapped the photo with her polaroid before he could object, giggling in the way she knew made him forgive her.

“Crazy broad,” he mumbled, rolling his eyes with the faintest smile on his lips. But when they were huddled into his backseat under the countless desert stars, he mumbled “Carla baby, you’re the best,” to her form that he thought was sleeping.

Carla was holding that picture to her chest when the sun rose again in the morning. She lay back in bed, having not slept at all that night. A summer breeze rustled her curtains through the open window, and she could almost hear his voice on it.

She wandered the apartment for the rest of the week, not bothering to lift that red waitressing dress from the floor. One night she went to an open-mic bar and crooned an old familiar tune of lost love into the microphone, fingers gliding over the strings, but she didn’t feel any closer to him. She sifted through solid representations of her life: Mom’s necklace, the flower from her sister’s first confirmation that she had tucked into a childhood Bible. Thistle’s guitar pick, Maria’s hairpin, Jesse’s ballcap…Stan Pines’ highschool ring.

He’d given it to her the day he first left that little girl who fell in love with his premature self. She ran her finger over the opal. She tried not to think that he’d have pawned it when they were travelling if he’d known she still had it. _Don’t be ridiculous_ , she thought, _he was still perfectly capable of sentimentality._  

He'd nearly stopped her heart once by offering marriage. Marriage, the thing she went with him to escape from. Could she really be blamed for being charmed by Thistle's words of liberation and wonder?

“I’ve been travelling too long…” she mused for just a moment, before mentally scolding herself. This was her life. It was chosen by herself, if not a higher power. She may be alone, but she was free. She was meant to be wild. She was meant to live a work of art. And that tingling sensation she get whenever she wanted to up and run again was rising.

But she was still tired. So, so tired.

As her final week in that little California town came to a close, her bags slowly filled her car. She lifted her existence once again until all that was left in her apartment was an empty shell and ghostly silence.

She sat with her hands frozen at the wheel, looking out to the horizon with the car pointed north—towards Oregon. Towards Stanford Pines, the bastard twin who didn’t bother to attend Lee’s funeral. The orange sunset of her photo was reflected onto the sky.

An idea was whispering its way through her mind…the idea that she would drive up to that little town where Ford apparently lived, yell and cry because no one told her of Stan’s death. Put on a real show. Then, they’d console each other, because she’d finally have a confidant in another fucked up person who couldn’t save him. _Maybe we’d even start a tragic love affair_ , she thought with a smirk that was more defensive than anything. She could add the other Pines twin to her repertoire, make the circle complete. Make her life truly worthy of the written word.

Carla turned the car around. The idea of looking into that face, _his_ face, but knowing he was gone, was too much for her to bear. She’d be looking at a ghost. So she drove on towards the east instead, towards nowhere.

She’d maybe stop by the nieces and nephews on the way. Get a slight taste of being a good, attentive aunt in a stable family. But she was meant to confuse them. She was meant to disappear, and be the one they tell their children they wish they knew better, but she flickered in and out of their life like a flame.

So only God knew where she was going. She just rode.


End file.
